Advanced Video Coding (AVC) (also referred to as H.264 and MPEG-4, Part 10) can be used to compress video content for transmission and storage, thereby saving bandwidth and memory. However, encoding in accordance with AVC can be computationally intense.
In certain applications, for example, live broadcasts, it is desirable to compress high definition television content in accordance with AVC in real time. However, the computationally intense nature of AVC operations in real time may exhaust the processing capabilities of certain processors. Parallel processing may be used to achieve real time AVC encoding, where the AVC operations are divided and distributed to multiple instances of hardware which perform the distributed AVC operations, simultaneously.
Ideally, the throughput can be multiplied by the number of instances of the hardware. However, in cases where a first operation is dependent on the results of a second operation, the first operation may not be executable simultaneously with the second operation. In contrast, the performance of the first operation may have to wait for completion of the second operation.
AVC uses temporal coding to compress video data. Temporal coding divides a picture into blocks and encodes the blocks using similar blocks from other pictures, known as reference pictures. To achieve the foregoing, the encoder searches the reference picture for a similar block. This is known as motion estimation. At the decoder, the block is reconstructed from the reference picture. However, the decoder uses a reconstructed reference picture. The reconstructed reference picture is different, albeit imperceptibly, from the original reference picture. Therefore, the encoder uses encoded and reconstructed reference pictures for motion estimation.
Using encoded and reconstructed reference pictures for motion estimation causes encoding of a picture to be dependent on the encoding of the reference pictures. This can be disadvantageous for parallel processing.
Additional limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.